Prominent quantum many-body scars in a truncated Schwinger model

Abstract

The high level of control and precision achievable in current synthetic quantum matter setups has enabled first attempts at quantum-simulating various intriguing phenomena in condensed matter physics, including those probing thermalization or its absence in closed quantum systems. In the companion Letter to this article [J.-Y.Desaules et al., Phys. Rev. B 107, L201105 (2023)], we have shown that quantum many-body scars, special low-entropy eigen states that weakly break ergodicity in nonintegrable systems, arise in spin-S quantum link models that converge to (1 + 1)-dimensional lattice quantum electrodynamics (Schwinger model) in the Kogut-Susskindlimit S → ∞. In this work, we further demonstrate that quantum many-body scars exist in a truncated version of the Schwinger model, and are qualitatively more prominent than their counterparts in spin-S quantum link models. We illustrate this by, among other things, performing a finite-S scaling analysis that strongly suggests that scarring persists in the truncated Schwinger model in the limit S → ∞. Although it does not asymptotically converge to the Schwinger model, the truncated formulation is relevant to synthetic quantum matter experiments,and also provides fundamental insight into the nature of quantum many-body scars, their connection to lattice gauge theories, and the thermalization dynamics of the latter. Our conclusions can be readily tested in current cold-atom setups.

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ORCID for Debasish Banerjee: orcid.org/0000-0003-0244-4337

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